Category Archives: Politics in Financial Policy

The momentum in the gold market has swung decisively back in a positive direction over the last several weeks. Gold prices fell below $1,240 per ounce in early December before rebounding in earnest. Through the first few days of 2018, gold prices have flirted with the $1,320/oz level.

When bitcoin prices gain about 10% on a single trading day, as they did during both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s sessions, the corresponding price increase is now more than $1,000. In one day! (However, prices then fell by more than $2,000 overnight on Friday.) The cryptocurrency sensation has clearly reached a fever pitch. For those unacquainted, bitcoin is the oldest, […]

Believe it or not, the United States Mint has been without an official Mint Director for the past six years. The fact that the position has remained vacant since 2011 is a vestige of the gridlock between the White House and Congress during the Obama Era, when Republicans refused to confirm many of the former president’s […]

As a wave of support for reform across the federal government gains steam, there is one “federal” institution that tends to resist any calls for transparency or reform: The Federal Reserve. The nation’s central bank is sometimes characterized as the fourth branch of government due to the importance of monetary policy on the U.S. and […]

It’s not often you hear about strikes by bureaucrats in a place like Great Britain, notorious for being the world’s first unabashed “Welfare State.” Even more surprising? The disgruntled workers are all employed by the Bank of England (BoE), the central bank of the United Kingdom.

One of the greatest problems of national importance—and literally of national security concern—is the ever-growing level of U.S. debt. It’s the looming problem, the proverbial “elephant in the room,” that never gets addressed. Our policymakers simply kick the can down the road on the debt issue every time. However, even more than eight years after the […]

Even before its inception, skeptics have been predicting the downfall of the euro, the common currency of the member nations of the European Monetary Union. Many saw this project as doomed from the start. Nonetheless, the currency quickly became the biggest rival to the U.S. dollar in international markets. After nearly two decades on the […]

It’s been nearly five decades since the Bretton Woods system, a de facto gold standard, was abandoned by the Nixon administration in 1971. Under this arrangement, the price of gold was fixed to a specific dollar amount (generally $35 per ounce), and then all other world currencies were tied to the dollar. The U.S. Treasury […]

There is a problem that has been hanging over the American coinage system like a dark pall for about the past decade. With each passing year, the scale of the problem grows worse, but philosophical traditions and interest groups have made resolving the issue a challenge for Congress. Now, two pieces of legislation aim to […]

With each passing month, the momentum in favor of reviving the use of gold and silver as money seems to build. An idea that has largely been panned as an untenable, fringe position when espoused by former U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul is now being enacted by one state legislature after another.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you probably know that the White House has stirred up a great deal of controversy after President Trump surprisingly sacked James Comey, the Director of the FBI. The fallout from this decision, which was seen as impeding the Bureau’s investigation into the Trump […]

Gold insider Ronan Manly of BullionStar recently carried out a journalistic investigation into how Sweden audits its gold reserves. He began with the broader goal of gathering information about central bank gold reserves generally—a topic shrouded in much mystery indeed.

Much has been made by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and her predecessor Ben Bernanke about making the central bank’s actions more open and transparent. A variety of steps have been taken toward this end, but they mainly consist of greater disclosure of Fed officials’ thinking on monetary policy and interest rates. As far as […]

For several years, one of the least controversial criticisms of the way the Treasury Department operates has been the need for a major coinage reform. For each of the last 11 years, Treasury has been subsidizing production of the one-cent penny and the five-cent nickel, both of which actually cost more to manufacture than they […]

So the Federal Reserve met the markets’ expectations and raised its target interest rate by 0.25% today. (Interestingly, Wall St immediately jumped higher as the news broke right along with gold prices.) But what direction will the Fed ultimately go over the next two years? Before we dive into the rate hike, here’s a quick […]

The World Gold Council (WGC) publishes quarterly data about trends in gold demand around the world, from industry to investment to mining and new technologies. In February, the research group released its 2016 report on central bank gold demand. As central banks have consistently been net buyers of the yellow metal over the past five years […]

Central banks are notorious for bashing the usefulness of gold as a financial asset, dismissing the metal as a “barbarous relic” of a bygone era of backward economics. (This despite these same banks maintaining large gold reserves on their balance sheets. As former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke once absurdly suggested to former U.S. Representative Ron […]